Alison Chitty trained at St Martin’s School of Art and Central School of Art and Design. She won an Arts Council bursary to the Victoria Theatre, where she became resident designer for seven years and designed over 40 productions. In 1979 she returned to London to work at the Hampstead Theatre, Riverside Studios, Royal Shakespeare Company and the West End.

She was resident designer at the National Theatre in London for 8 years where she regularly collaborated with Sir Peter Hall. Her productions there include Mike Leigh’s Grief and Two Thousand Years, Scenes from the Big Picture and The Voysey Inheritance, for which she won an Olivier Award. In 2010 they hosted a major retrospective of her work.

Equally active in the field of opera, she has designed productions for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, English National Opera, Opera Holland Park, Opera North, Chicago Lyric Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Staatsoper Berlin, Opera National de Paris, Staatsoper Munich, Teatro La Fenice Venice and in Dallas, Seattle, Santa Fe and Geneva. Recent productions include Harrison Birtwistle’s The Minotaur (available on Opus Arte) for ROH, Rigoletto for La Fenice, Theodora for the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and Betrothal in a Monastery in Toulouse.

She was awarded an OBE in 2004, received the Young Vic Award in 2008, was made a Royal Designer for Industry in 2009 by the Royal Society of Arts and received an Honorary Fellowship from the University of the Arts London in 2013.

Current productions include a Ring cycle at Göteborg Opera, and a return to Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

Pirates of Penzance

English National Opera

The designer Alison Chitty [dresses] the chorus as impeccable Victorian maidens, ploddy policeman and picture-book pirates… The action is framed within circles and other abstract geometric shapes, with location suggested purely by colour and an array of beautifully drawn Cornish birds.

The silliness of the plot is enhanced by the intense pigments of Alison Chitty’s simple but sophisticated designs, near abstract but with just enough suggestive detail.

Fiona Maddocks, The Observer

The trendily minimalist set designs by Alison Chitty suggest we are looking through an onshore telescope at the pirates’ ship.

Richard Fairman, The Financial Times

It is conventionally stages in 19th-century costume much as the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company would have envisioned – with the token modernism of a streamlined, semi-abstract set by Alison Chitty.

Michael White, The New York Times

Alison Chitty’s fluorescent designs for this production suggest the opening and closing of a camera shutter, and the ship which disgorges the pirates is bandbox-dainty.

Michael Church, The Independent ****

Nabucco

Royal Opera House

Alessandro Carletti's lighting bathes Alison Chitty's austere set of grey plinths in the pale wash of dawn, the glare of noon, the softening of dusk and the long shadows of a moonlit night.

Chitty's plinths display a wider dramatic range than the principals, channeling the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, tombs on the Mount of Olives, the tight alleys of the Lodz ghetto and the gas chambers.

Anna Picard, The Independent

Parsifal

Royal Opera House

The triumph of this new interpretation, directed by Stephen Langridge and designed by Alison Chitty, is that it de-sanctifies Parsifal : all trace of pseudo-sacred mumbo-jumbo is removed. What we get instead is a visual shorthand, contemporary but timeless, that illuminates the opera’s philosophical complexity while keeping the narrative both straightforward and continually mesmerising. Across a five-hour span, that is no mean feat...

A Provincial Life

Sherman Cymru, Cardiff

Yet in Alison Chitty's beautiful bare and open design the play moves with a marvellous freedom: scythers walk in rhythm across a field; families cluster miserably around a stove; the sense of small episodes in a massive space has rarely been so powerfully summoned.

Susannah Clapp, The Observer

“Grief” by Mike Leigh

National Theatre

The action is set in a suburb near London and follows its characters through several months in 1957-58. The period setting is meticulously caught in both Alison Chitty’s oppressively neat but cheerless suburban living room design, the Fifties clothes, and the flavour of the dialogue

Daily Telegraph

The Minotaur

Royal Opera House - Revival

Designer Alison Chitty’s sets had a rugged simplicity which sat perfectly with Birtwistle’s vision, creating a part-virtual bull-ring in which this subversively appealing creature could kill, dream, lament and finally be killed.

Michael Church, The Independent

Stephen Langridge’s production is stylish, playing out in the wan sunlight and oppressive darkness of Alison Chitty’s set.

Erica Jeal, The Guardian *****

Alison Chitty’s bullring-inspired designs stamp their indelible mark on Birtwistle’s mythical landscape, a place of fear and beauty.

Fiona Maddocks, The Observer

The Io Passion

Aldeburgh Festival

Over 90 minutes, the same small things happen again and again. Ingeniously and with not little menace, Alison Chitty’s set presents these two perspectives simultaneously, one on each side of the stage.

Nick Kimberley, Evening Standard

Alison Chitty: Design Process 1970 - 2010

Design Process 1970 - 2010

View a PDF of the brochure released to celebrate the National Theatre's 2010 exhibition dedicated to the work of Alison Chitty. The brochure includes drawings and photos from throughout her varied career, as well as articles written by Alison Chitty which give an insight into her design process.

These photos are available to be downloaded.Right click on a desired image and select the "Save Link As" option.

The designer Alison Chitty [dresses] the chorus as impeccable Victorian maidens, ploddy policeman and picture-book pirates… The action is framed within circles and other abstract geometric shapes, with location suggested purely by colour and an array of beautifully drawn Cornish birds.

The triumph of this new interpretation, directed by Stephen Langridge and designed by Alison Chitty, is that it de-sanctifies Parsifal : all trace of pseudo-sacred mumbo-jumbo is removed. What we get instead is a visual shorthand, contemporary but timeless, that illuminates the opera’s philosophical complexity while keeping the narrative both straightforward and continually mesmerising. Across a five-hour span, that is no mean feat...